Lizzie Borden: The Unsolved Mystery
On August 4th, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered in their home in Fall
River, Massachusetts.
Their heads had been split open in a fit of rage from nearly a dozen blows from a hatchet.
There was no theft, and no sign of a break-in.
Their 32-year old daughter, Lizzie Borden, was at home when her parents were killed.
She inherited her father’s multi-million dollar fortune, and everyone in Fall River
believed that she killed her parents in cold blood.
But in the end, there simply was not enough evidence to convict her, and she was allowed
to go free.
Nearly 120 years later, the case is still an unsolved mystery.
Did Lizzie Borden really kill her parents, or is the identity of the real killer still
unknown?
The Borden Legacy, and Lizzie’s Childhood Andrew Borden came from a long line of wealthy
and successful people, but his own parents struggled with poverty.
As a young man, he started working as an underwriter at a bank in Fall River, Massachusetts.
He used his paychecks to purchase investment real estate, and ran furniture and textile
businesses.
He was eventually promoted as the manager of the bank.
Even though he was making a lot of money, he only paid for the bare necessities for
himself and his family.
His fortune grew to over $300,000, which is the modern-day equivalent of $8 million.
He married a woman named Sarah Anthony Morse, and they had three children together.
Emma was the oldest.
They had a second daughter named Alice, who died as a baby.
Lizzie Borden was the youngest daughter, born in 1860.
When she was only two years old, Lizzie’s mother Sarah became gravely ill.
Emma was twelve at the time, so she was old enough to remember the death of her sister
Alice, and fully understood the gravity of losing their mother.
On her deathbed, Emma swore to take care of baby Lizzie like a mother, and she took that
promise very seriously.
Three years after Sarah’s death, Andrew Borden married a woman named Abby Durfee.
Emma, who was 15 at the time, refused to address Abby her as “mother”, and called her by
her first name their entire childhood.
Lizzie grew up to be very close with her sister Emma, who truly did feel more like a mother
than a big sister.
However, this backfired, because teenage Emma was constantly reminding her younger sister
that their birth mother was dead.
Because of this, Lizzie never formed a close relationship with her stepmother.
She later described their relationship as cordial, but she grew up feeling as though
she never really knew a mother’s love.
We don’t know much about the intimate details of Lizzie’s relationship with her father,
except that he was very busy with his full-time job at the bank, and running his businesses
on the side.
Lizzie claimed to love him very much, but his shrewd business tactics and lack of empathy
for customers defaulting on their loans caused some people in town to dislike him and his
family.
Lizzie Borden’s elementary school teachers described her as being aloof, so she was either
painfully shy, or felt as though she didn’t want to make friends.
She was also known for having dramatic mood swings.
She could either be very relaxed and unemotional, or she could burst out in fits of rage.
This is not uncommon for children who have lost their parents at a young age, but she
was severely neglected, considering the tragedy that had befallen her family.
Adulthood The wealthy members of the extended Borden
family lived in mansions up in a fashionable neighborhood called The Hill.
They enjoyed an easy life with teams of servants at their beckon call.
Andrew Borden, on the other hand, rented half of a duplex for his family, and waited until
his children were grown up to buy that house and combine both halves into one single home.
He never installed electricity or indoor plumbing, even though it was actually quite affordable
at that time.
As she grew older, Lizzie began to learn more about her wealthy extended family who lived
up on The Hill.
Her cousins were always attending parties and dances, and went to the local theater
together with young people their own age.
Lizzie wanted to join the rest of her friends, but Andrew Borden thought that all of these
activities were a waste of money.
He never gave his daughters an allowance to attend any of the social outings.
Living in a working-class neighborhood, Emma and Lizzie seemed far too rich to fit in where
they lived, and yet their father never gave them money to socialize on The Hill.
They were stuck in an isolating situation, and felt like outcasts.
Her cousins all married rich men, and their fathers paid dowries to help them buy their
own houses.
Meanwhile, Lizzie and Emma were still living with their parents, and their only social
interactions came from church-related events.
Lizzie Borden really only had one close friend; her neighbor, Alice Russell.
Many people who knew Lizzie Borden before the murders claimed that she was a gentle
person with a very kind heart.
She would leave slices of chocolate cake for men who came to her father’s house for maintenance,
and insisted on tipping the groundskeeper whenever her father was too cheap to do it
himself.
She also gave candy to the local children, along with cards signed “From Aunty Borden”.
Even though women were not allowed to hold a job at that time, Lizzie kept herself busy.
She taught Sunday School to the local children in Fall River, and most people in the town
knew of her as being a very pious and religious woman.
She was also heavily involved in local women’s charity groups.
While she testified that she loved her father very much, Lizzie fundamentally disagreed
with him in the way he handled his money.
She also believed that her stepmother was trying to take advantage of his fortune.
When she was 27 years old, Lizzie’s father gave a house to his wife’s half-sister for
free.
This made Lizzie and Emma furious, because they were his own daughters, and yet he had
never given them such an extravagant gift.
When he realized how unfair this was, he gave his daughters the deed to the house he grew
up in to try to pacify them.
However, there was a strict code of etiquette that unmarried women could not live alone.
Since Emma and Lizzie never found husbands, owning the deed to their grandfather’s home
was virtually useless, and they were never allowed to move out of their father’s house.
They eventually sold the house back to their father for $5,000.
Even after doing this, it was still not enough to make up for the jealousy and resentment
Lizzie felt towards her stepmother Abby.
She stopped calling her “mother”, and only referred to her as “Mrs. Borden”.
Lizzie Borden was unhappy living with her father and stepmother, and she spent as much
time out of the house as she possibly could.
Soon after their argument about the houses, Andrew Borden agreed to let Lizzie visit Europe,
but the trip abroad only made her realize just how much she had missed in her younger
years.
When she returned home to the United States, she often chose not to eat meals with her
parents, and went up to her bedroom without saying hello.
Life in the Borden house went on like this for several more years.
In 1892, Lizzie Borden was 32 years old, and her sister Emma was 42.
Neither of them had gotten married.
In the 1800’s, this made them “spinsters”, or women who were considered to be far too
old to find a husband.
There is no record of why they were never married, but their family issues clearly had
something to do with it.
Lizzie continued to devote herself to church, and the local animal rescue.
She was raising a family of pigeons on their property, and she loved them like pets.
In June of that same year, Andrew purchased a hatchet, and started killing Lizzie’s
birds so he could save money on meat.
Lizzie may have felt that that her window of opportunity to escape this dysfunctional
family and find a better life was closing in on her.
Her father was 70 years old, and she needed to face the possibility that he may die soon.
If his money was controlled by her stepmother Abby, she knew things would get much worse.
At any moment, Lizzie Borden and her sister Emma’s lives were going to be over...Unless
they did something to stop it.
The Day Of The Murders As we mentioned earlier, Andrew and Abby Borden
were murdered on August 4th, 1892.
The events leading up to their murders may give a clue as to what may have really happened
on that fateful day.
On August 2nd, the entire Borden family was feeling sick.
Abby Borden visited her local doctor, asking if it was possible that her bread had been
poisoned.
Her doctor said that it was far more likely that she simply ate some rotten meat, and
that everyone in the house was suffering from food poisoning.
This not uncommon back then, since there were no refrigerators to keep meat and cheese from
going bad in the summer heat.
On August 3rd, the night before the murders, Lizzie and Emma’s uncle John Morse showed
up unannounced.
He did not bring any luggage, but he asked to stay the night.
John Morse was the brother of Sarah Morse, Andrew’s first wife, and the girl’s biological
uncle.
For whatever reason, this made Lizzie Borden feel uneasy.
She told her friend, Alice Russell, that she was terrified that someone was about to hurt
their family.
According to his testimony, John Morse woke up at 6AM the next day, on August 4th.
Bridget, the maid, cooked food for her masters and guest, and served their breakfast to Abby,
Andrew, and John around 7AM.
John announced that he was going to see his other relatives in town, and left the house
around 8:30 in the morning.
Lizzie said that she was feeling sick, so she never said hello to her uncle, or came
down to eat breakfast with her family.
Andrew Borden went to work at the bank around 9AM.
According to the maid, Bridget, Mrs. Borden asked her to wash the windows outside that
day, and she said that she would make the bed and do the laundry in the guest bedroom.
When Bridget was done washing the windows, she was feeling exhausted from working in
the summer heat, and she was still sick to her stomach.
She had been vomiting in the backyard, and desperately needed to rest.
Andrew was feeling sick at work, so he returned home around 11AM, but all of the doors were
locked with a dead bolt, so his key to the front door would not work.
This was strange, and he pounded on the door to have someone let him in.
Bridget rushed to the front door to unlock it.
Andrew Borden decided to take a nap on the living room couch, hoping he could sleep off
his sickness during his lunch break.
Bridget saw this as an opportunity to rest, so she went up to her bedroom in the attic
to take a nap as well.
Lizzie claims that she had to go outside to the barn to look for fishing lures for a trip
she was taking the following weekend.
According to her testimony, during that small 10 to 15-minute window of time outside, someone
had taken a hatchet to her father’s face 11 times.
His eyeballs were cut in half, his nose was gone, and he was barely recognizable as a
person anymore.
Lizzie walked back into the house, and when she saw her father’s mutilated body.
She screamed, and called out to Bridget that her father was dead.
She ran next door to a neighbor named Adelaide Churchill, saying, “Oh Mrs. Churchill, do
come over.
Someone has killed father.”
They notified the police and the family doctor, who arrived to examine the body.
By that time, everyone in the neighborhood knew about the crime.
Andrew Borden’s wounds were still fresh, suggesting that the attack happened very recently.
Lizzie’s friend, Alice Russell, rushed over to the house to see what was wrong.
Lizzie was hysterical, and leaned on Alice for comfort.
Lizzie asked Bridget to check upstairs for her stepmother, saying, “Will someone find
Mrs. Borden?”
Mrs. Borden was lying face-down on the floor of one of the guest bedrooms.
She had also been killed by an ax, but this time, it was in the back of the head.
Mrs. Borden’s blood was dry, and the medical examiners estimated that she died roughly
two hours before her husband.
This would mean that the killer must have been in the house the entire time, waiting
for the perfect opportunity to kill Andrew Borden.
Lizzie’s sister Emma was out of town visiting a friend, and they had to send a telegram,
telling her to come home.
She had a solid alibi about her whereabouts, so the police removed her as potential suspect.
Bridget the maid was home, but she had nothing to gain by killing her masters.
She was also removed as a potential suspect by the police.
When the police arrived, it was noted that no one in the house was covered in blood.
If Lizzie Borden really did kill her father, she would have had blood splattered all over
her clothes.
She would not have been able to clean herself off within a matter of 10 minutes, especially
without running water in the house.
But, considering that she was one of the only people home at the time, and she had the most
to gain from her parents’ deaths, all eyes were on her.
The Inquest and Trial Lizzie and Emma Borden stood with their family
members and her father’s business associates at their parent’s funeral.
Instead of watching their parents’ caskets get buried in the ground, the police ordered
the bodies to be taken for a second autopsy.
The police also had free reign to search the entire house from top to bottom, and yet they
could not find a murder weapon, or any solid evidence that would prove the identity of
the killer.
Lizzie Borden was questioned for several hours by the police, and her answers were sometimes
inconsistent, as if she couldn’t get her story straight.
The police saw this as evidence that she was lying.
However, her doctor had injected her with morphine before each interview, saying that
it would help calm her nerves.
These injections would have made her feel mentally cloudy and confused.
In some cases, the drug can even cause delusions and hallucinations.
Despite having this drug running through her veins, she still never confessed to killing
her parents.
Leading up to the trial, Emma Borden and Alice Russell witnessed Lizzie Borden burning one
of her dresses in the backyard.
She claimed that she was simply disposing of old clothes that had paint stains on them.
She gave the police the blue dress that everyone had witnessed her wearing the day of the murders,
and it was completely free of blood.
They also never found a bloody dress when searching the house.
But the police saw the burning of the mystery dress as a sign that she may have changed
out of the clothes she killed her parents in, and she was trying to destroy the evidence.
Lizzie Borden was arrested on suspicion of killing her parents, and she was taken to
a holding cell in a women’s prison.
The day of the trial was from June 5th to the 20th of 1893, so it was nearly a year
after the death of her parents.
A pharmacist named Eli Bence testified in court that Lizzie Borden requested to buy
potassium cyanide the day before the murder, but he refused to sell it to her, because
he suspected that she had terrible intentions.
When the police exhumed the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Borden, the autopsy report showed
that they had ever been poisoned.
It was just bad food, after all.
So Mr. Bence’s claim didn’t prove that Lizzie did anything wrong.
Her neighbor and friend, Alice Russell, also testified against her about burning her dress.
However, without having the actual dress on-hand, they could not prove that there was ever blood
on it.
Even after having a year to prepare their case, the police only had circumstantial evidence
against Lizzie Borden, and it was simply not enough to prove that she was guilty.
The members of the jury were all men, which was customary of the time.
All of them had a very hard time believing that the same woman who was the Sunday school
teacher could really be the same monster who committed cold-blooded murder.
They thought it was more likely that a prowler broke into the home and killed Mr. and Mrs.
Borden.
They only took 90 minutes to make the decision that she was not guilty.
Lizzie Borden Goes Free After her parent’s deaths, Lizzie and her
sister Emma split their father’s inheritance in half, and it was more than enough money
to take care of them for the rest of their lives.
They could finally afford to buy a luxurious house on The Hill called Maplecroft.
They also hired a staff of maids and a driver to take them anywhere they wanted to go in
a horse-drawn coach.
Lizzie changed her name to “Lizbeth” after moving, in hopes of escaping her reputation.
In her mind, the life on The Hill may have seemed like a million miles away, but the
reality was that they were still in Fall River.
Her reputation as a murderer continued to follow her for the rest of her life.
Magazines reported false rumors that she was a shoplifter, and that she killed baby kittens
and birds as a child.
People did not want to sit near her in church, and her house was pummelled with rotten eggs
on a regular basis.
No one wanted to be associated with this woman who may have murdered her parents.
Local children made up a rhyme about her murder, and enjoyed singing it outside her window:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe.
She gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”
Despite all of the criticism, Lizzie never moved far away to escape the ridicule, and
tried to make the best of her situation.
She began attending plays at the local theater, and threw parties in her new home for the
cast and crew.
She seemed to be particularly infatuated with an actress named Nance O’Neil.
O’Neil was known for having a deep voice and a masculine attitude, which lead some
people to believe that two may have been having an affair.
It turns out that O’Neil truly was a great actress worthy of admiration, though, because
she eventually moved to Hollywood and starred in a few movies.
Even though Lizzie Borden was now wealthy and living in a good part of town, she continued
to be single for the rest of her life, but she may have been concealing a forbidden romance.
The only real evidence of this was a letter she wrote to a female friend, saying something
rather romantic; “I dreamed of you the other night, but I dare not put my dreams on paper.”
For some unknown reason, Emma and Lizzie got into an argument, and Emma decided it was
time for her to move out of Fall River.
She moved far away to escape the bad reputation that the Borden name brought them, and the
sisters never saw each other again.
Some people speculate that this is proof of Lizzie’s guilt, and that she must have confessed
to Emma.
However, Emma left shortly after one of Lizzie’s big parties, in which the actress Nance O'Neill
had attended.
Some people believe that it may be more likely that she was caught in a lesbian affair, or
Emma simply disapproved of her new lifestyle.
Lizzie Borden continued to live alone in her Maplecroft mansion for the rest of her life.
She died at the age of 66.
She left a significant portion of her estate to the Fall River Animal Rescue League in
her will.
She also left thousands of dollars to each of her close friends and cousins.
Today, both her childhood home by the river and Maplecroft mansion were purchased by an
investor and turned into museums.
To this day, people still speculate whether Lizzie Borden truly
did kill her parents, but the world may never know.